The crash of the NFT market

These days one does not hear many breathless reports of new NFTs (non-fungible tokens) being sold for huge amounts and being touted by celebrities. There is a reason for this. This site has examined the state of the NFT market and found that they have crashed in value with most of them now worth nothing.

The hype around NFTs peaked in the 2021/22 bull run that saw nearly $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume recorded in August 2021. From this, NFTs captured the collective imagination worldwide with multiple news reports of million-dollar deals for sales of certain NFT assets.

People were excited about this new type of online asset and something of a goldrush appeared to start. Fast forward to today… and the NFT market is starkly different.

Data from the Block reveals a weekly traded value of around $80 million in July 2023, just 3% of its peak back in August 2021.
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Using data provided by NFT Scan, we have compiled a comprehensive analysis of over 73 thousand NFT collections (73,257, to be exact) in order to identify key trends, assess the health of the market, determine the factors contributing to successful projects, and hopefully gain insights into the potential future trajectory of the NFT ecosystem.

The results were shocking, to say the least.

Of the 73,257 NFT collections we identified, an eye-watering 69,795 of them have a market cap of 0 Ether (ETH).

This statistic effectively means that 95% of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments. Having looked into those figures, we would estimate that 95% to include over 23 million people who’s investments are now worthless.

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Running up the score

I am not a fan of American football but one nice tradition they have is that, at least at the college level, it is considered bad form to run up the score on your opponents once the game has been effectively decided. This is because there is no tangible benefit in college games to having a huge margin of victory. Rubbing the opponent’s noses in the dirt is frowned upon and even though it does happen, coaches who do that tend to be criticized. So once a win is assured, coaches tend to take out their top players and give the second and third string players some playing time and do not try as hard to score more.

However, in the World Rugby Cup being played in France, the rules do favor lopsided scores during the preliminary group stage. This is because when it comes to qualifying for the quarter-final knockout stage, only the top two teams from each of the four groups of five teams can make it, and hence you need some tie-breaker rules if two teams happen to have the same number of points based on wins and bonus points. And almost all those tie-breaker rules depend upon the number of points and tries scored by each side. So running up the score is a form of insurance in case you depend upon tie-breakers to see if you qualify for the second stage.

As a result, we have had some enormously lop-sided results, mostly at the expense of Namibia and Romania. Namibia lost 52-8 to Italy, 71-3 to New Zealand, and 96-0 to France. Romania lost 82-8 to Ireland and 76-0 to South Africa.

In general, I watch just the highlights after each game is over but I had no desire to see Namibia and Romania humiliated like this so I skipped those games. Close games are much more interesting.

Another dreary shutdown drama

Once again we are going through the shutdown brinkmanship, with the September 30 deadline for passing a bill that funds the federal government approaching and the Republican party in the House of Representatives in seeming disarray and unable to agree on any of the 11 separate appropriate bills that they must bring to the floor for a vote. They cannot seem to even agree on the terms of what they normally do in such situations and that is punt, by passing a continuing resolution that funds the government at the current levels for a short time while they try and work out a solution.

After the last elections in 2022, Republicans had a 222-213 majority which means that they could afford to lose at most four votes if all Democrats are present and vote as a bloc against them. Currently it is 221-212 because of two vacancies due to one member from each party having resigned and special elections to fill their seats to be held only in November. And the Republican nutters in the House Freedom Caucus have used that small majority as leverage to threaten to vote against any spending bill and shut down the government in order to get … it is not clear exactly what, other than a spending total that is smaller than what the Republicans agreed to during the debt ceiling standoff.

We have seen this film many times before, so much so that it has become a joke. I know someone who works for the federal government. When an earlier shutdown was imminent that would have sent all employees home, they received detailed memos of what they had to do to shut up shop and turn out the lights, and and what they could and could not do while the shutdown continued. But this has happened so many times, that they now know the drill and do not need to to be told. It just occasions rolling of the eyes,

No one other than journalists in the media who are assigned to cover that beat seem to talk about the shutdown. It just does not seem urgent. By now it just seems like political theater that is not worth bothering about, even though a shutdown is a deadly serious.matter that will inconvenience a vast number of people.

No, not the dog!

Author Michael Wolff is known for his gossipy, lightly sourced books that dish insider dirt. The stories he relates are titillating but not to be taken at face value since they lack convincing evidence. But they do serve as a measure of the zeitgeist within the political establishment and his latest book has an indicator of how low Florida governor Ron DeSantis has sunk because he provides an anecdote that, while having dinner at the Tucker Carlson home, DeSantis apparently irritated Carlson’s wife by dominating the conversation and may have actually kicked one of the family dogs.

The DeSantis couple allegedly failed “to read the room,” especially with Carlson’s wife, “a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house,” Wolff notes. “For two hours Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversation ritual or propriety, reeling off an unselfconscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments.”

Making matters worse, Wolff claims, an “impersonal” DeSantis seemed dismissive and may have used physical force against one of the Carlson family’s four beloved spaniel pups.

During the dinner, Wolff writes, “DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: she did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a ‘fascist.’ The pot calling the kettle even blacker. Forget Ron DeSantis.”

Is the story true? Who knows? But kicking people’s pet dogs and cats is something that is beyond the pale for anyone. This is the behavior of cartoon villains and even an allegation of doing so is damaging. Even some of the cult followers of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), although ever-willing to overlook his groping and other assaults of women, may find it hard to forgive their idol for doing so, unless they could be persuaded that the pet was the Devil incarnate or Joe Biden in disguise.

Adding to DeSantis’s woes, a new poll finds the one-time SSAT-slayer slipping to fifth place in New Hampshire polling.

Maybe we should bring out a DeSantis lettuce to see which lasts longer.

The legal woes of Trump’s cronies mount up

The indictments by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis against serial sex abuser Donald trump (SSAT) and eighteen others over their efforts to overturn the election results continues to have fallouts. Last month I wrote about grumbling by some of the other defendants as to why SSAT’s PACs are not paying their legal fees since they were acting in his interest and sometimes on his instructions. I said that this might portend that they might seek to defect from SSAT in an effort to reach favorable plea deals.

It appears that Jenna Ellis, one of the ‘gaggle of crackpot lawyers’ surrounding SSAT and enabling his fruitless efforts and was one of those complainers, is turning on him

Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.

“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
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“Why I have chosen to distance is because of that, frankly, malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.

“And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling.

“And I think that we do need to, as Americans and as conservatives and particularly as Christians, take this very seriously and understand where are we putting our vote.”

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Winning ugly in rugby

In rugby, there is a style of game that is attractive to watch and that is where a team advances by passing the ball back and forth among teammates while running, and even when there is a breakdown due to a dropped pass or a tackle, quickly launch a second or even third phase by getting the ball out to its fast running backs. This attacking style is fun to watch.

Then there is the slower defensive game where the burly forwards dominate and ground is gained slowly with the ball frequently obscured by the masses of players converged on it and piled on top of one another, with the referee then blowing the whistle for a penalty or to start a set piece scrum. This game is definitely not as exciting to watch but is often the option chosen when playing in rain and the ground is muddy that makes the ball and ground slippery and the fast passing game difficult to pull off. Some teams choose the dour defensive game as a strategy even when the weather conditions do not require it

Robert Kitson clearly prefers the fast game and he chides England for playing ‘robotic’ rugby against Japan in the current World Cup, when they scored all of their 27 points by penalties and drop goals, all kicked by their incredibly accurate fly half George Ford. Kitson says that Portugal (who lost to Wales) and Uruguay (who lost to France) and Fiji (who also lost to Wales) are playing better rugby even as they lost to higher ranked teams.

While fans of rugby who have no strong partisan allegiances will clearly prefer the fast, open style because it is so entertaining, those who are ardent supporters of their team will undoubtedly prefer an ugly win to a pretty loss.

My high school team in Sri Lanka consistently had one of the best school rugby teams in the country. For a few years they had a coach who carried the desire for fast, attacking play to the extreme. The players were forbidden from doing the standard defensive move of kicks to touch to relieve pressure even when they were deep in their own territory or even behind their own goal line. They always had to run and pass the ball. This gave their opponents chances to win ugly because since they knew that our team would not kick the ball to touch, they could anticipate better what our team would do and move their own defensive players into attacking positions.

So while my school team was the most fun to watch, and they won a lot because the coach was very talented in teaching them how to play this type of game and motivating them to do so, they were vulnerable to opponents who executed a careful game plan that could exploit the lack of defensive plays.

Republicans looking for magic formula on abortion

When the US Supreme Court in their Dobbs ruling in 2021 overturned its Roe v. Wade precedent and declared that the constitution did not provide a right to abortion, there was jubilation among the anti-abortion forces. They had finally achieved their dream and red states everywhere started enacting severe restrictions on abortion, some of those having been written in advance of Dobbs and just waiting for the opportunity to pass them.

But the Dobbs decision also galvanized the abortion-rights movement. Some states expanded the right to abortion while state constitutional amendments passed by referendum in Vermont, California, Michigan, Kentucky, Montana, and Kansas. Another is pending in Ohio this November. Furthermore, this issue is seen as playing an important role in increasing Democratic party success in the 2022 mid-term elections, dashing the hopes of Republicans who had been hoping that a ‘red wave’ would give them control of both houses of Congress with large majorities.
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The Trump interview

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) sat down for a lengthy interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, which I did not watch. Of course, one does not need to watch any SSAT interview to know that he will issue his usual litany of lies and whines about how he is being persecuted and Welker has been criticized in some quarters for not refuting all the lies. But William Saletan says that such criticisms are unwarranted and that she did a good job because she did remind viewers of what kind of awful person SSAT is.

Here is the beginning. and end of his article.

THROUGHOUT HIS 78-MINUTE interview with Kristen Welker, Donald Trump spewed lies and delusions. The NBC News journalist, like others who have interviewed the former president, tried to parry his propaganda but let some of it pass so she could get on with her questions. For this reason, many of Trump’s critics judge Welker’s performance a failure.

I take a different view. I’m less interested in what Welker failed to do than in what she did. She exposed, up close and at length, Trump’s psychopathologies.

Let me take you through a few examples.
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IF YOU CAME TO THIS INTERVIEW hoping that Welker or NBC News would refute every lie Trump told, you’ll be disappointed. But I don’t think exhaustive refutation is what we need. In polls, Trump is running even with Biden because many Americans are unhappy with the economy, and most see Biden as old and tired.

These people need to be reacquainted with the reality of Trump. They need to be reminded how recklessly he makes decisions, how poorly he controls his impulses, how ruthlessly he lies, and how impervious he is to correction. They need to be reminded how callously he disregards his oath of office and how little he cares about anyone but himself. They need to be reminded what a psychopath he is.

That’s what Welker accomplished. She has done her job.

Oil companies sued by California for lying about climate change

The state of California has joined several other states and municipalities in suing five major oil companies, charging that they had known for a long time from their internal science that the burning of fossil fuels was harming the environment and driving climate change but lying about it to the public.

California is suing five of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, alleging that they engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception” about climate change and the risks posed by fossil fuels that has forced the state to spend tens of billions of dollars to address environmental-related damages.

State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit Friday in San Francisco County Superior Court alleging that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the American Petroleum Institute have known since the 1950s that the burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet but instead of alerting the public about the dangers posed to the environment they chose to deny or downplay the effects.

“Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change,” Bonta said in a statement, “but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough.”

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Fiji beats Australia for the first time in Rugby World Cup

Fiji caused a major upset at the World Cup being played in France when they defeated Australia 22-15 in their group match.

It was not just Fiji’s first win against Australia in the World Cup, but their first of any sort at all since they beat them by two points at the SCG way back in 1954. Given that, the surprising thing was Australia never looked close to winning this one.

You can see the highlights.

I will not try to explain the rules of rugby, except that scoring a touchdown (also known as a ‘try’) gets you five points. If it is followed by a conversion, you get a further two points. A penalty goal or a drop goal gets you three points.

But the tournament has an interesting scoring system. It gives four points for a win, two points for a tie, and zero points for a loss. But to encourage teams to try to get points by scoring tries (which are more exciting) instead of penalty goals, a team gets a bonus point if it scores four or more tries in a game. But even more interesting is that a losing team can get a bonus point if the margin of their defeat is seven points or less. So in the case of the Wales-Fiji game that Wales won 32-26, Fiji got two points even though they lost: one point for scoring four tries and another for losing by just six points.

There are three teams from the central Polynesian archipelago region among the twenty playing in the tournament and they represent by far the nations with the smallest populations. Fiji has about 900,000, Samoa has about 200,000, and Tonga has just 100,000. That they can manage to field teams that can compete at the top level with countries that have far greater populations says something about the quality of their rugby programs. I noticed that some of the other teams also had players with Polynesian names on their squads, that further shows the strength of the Polynesian rugby traditions.